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The AI Nobel Prizes Could Change the Focus of Research
It has been a billboard week for artificial intelligence research. But could big wins for Demis Hassabis and Geoffrey Hinton change broader scientific incentives?
That he won the prize—the most prestigious in science—may not have been all that much of a shock: A day earlier, Geoffrey Hinton, often called one of the “godfathers of AI,” and Princeton University’s John Hopfield were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their work on machine learning. The extent to which academics are likely to follow the media attention, money, and Nobel Prize committee plaudits is a question that vexes Julian Togelius, an associate professor of computer science at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering who works on AI. And given the competitive nature of academia, where funding is increasingly scarce and directly linked to researchers’ job prospects, it seems likely that the combination of a trendy topic that—as of this week—has the potential to earn high-achievers a Nobel Prize could be too tempting to resist.
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